Foreign aid — to corporations

The American public views foreign aid as the kind of spending the Government should cut. I’ll venture that few understand the aid that the Tax Code supplies for the foreign operations of U.S. companies. This aid is exemplified by General Electric’s manipulation of the Code to use foreign operations to reduce its U.S. tax bill. It is explained in great detail in Edward D. Kleinbard’s “Stateless Income,” downloadable at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1791769.

Here’s the antipathy to foreign aid, from http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/04/economistyougov_polling: